*laughs* Fair point. I think the gap between announcement and availability of product has been longer than anybody is comfortable with (customers especially). My guess is that Cisco felt that they just had to get their message out there in order to bolster confidence in them embracing SDN wholeheartedly when the market (and customers) were beginning to wonder what the heck their strategy was. That leaves us with a whacking great gap from talk to action which then generates an expected level of cynicism all around.

The real test will be when we see not only what the hardware itself can do, but how the software ecosystem develops around it and what new capabilities can be offered to make it a compelling investment.

As always, it appears there's no better place than CLUS for JC to get out his sunshine pump, nearly three years on and we're still talking 'STRATEGY'. The only story so far is that they've got a bunch of switches that have two chips, instead of one and wait for it...........can be implemented in a leaf/spine architecture....WOW!

No, not that I've seen, and that's likely by design. That level of backward integration would be a disincentive to buy new hardware, after all. In contrast, spending the R&D on a security focus seems smart. Salespeople can walk in and yell, "Target! eBay!" and get attention.

Marcia, thanks for the great overview of the new developments with ACI. I know readers have been asking for more information, and there's been a lot to digest in terms of the migration path. Most of the customers I talked to at Cisco Live seemed pretty positive about the strategy and are planning to deploy it -- maybe not immediately, but at some point. Are others receiving similar feedback?

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